Rambouillet
Repeated?

In February of 1999, after the staged "massacre"
of 45 KLA bandits at Racak, Madeleine Albright summoned the
Yugoslav leadership to a castle in Rambouillet, France, where
they were to sign a NATO ultimatum providing for their unconditional
surrender. KLA's warlord Hashim Thaci, sitting right across
from the legitimate representatives of the Yugoslav and Serbian
government, refused to sign the ultimatum himself until the
very last moment  thus making it appear as if the KLA
was not too thrilled with it either, while giving Albright
and her warlord Wesley Clark an official excuse to bomb Yugoslavia.
Belgrade, aware of the ultimatum's
provisions, refused to submit. Rambouillet would have
become a synonym for outrage in international affairs, had
it not been overshadowed by NATO's subsequent terror-bombing.

Yet here
it is, nearly three years hence, and a Rambouillet-style capitulation
is being demanded of another country, Yugoslavia's weakened
southern neighbor, which has been, until recently, an obedient
vassal of the NATO Empire.

MACEDONIA AFLAME

Images that
were beamed to TV screens across the world on Monday and Tuesday
were eerily reminiscent of Sarajevo in 1992, another city
marked with urban battles and quarter-to-quarter shelling,
with devastating effects. Two days of heavy fighting caused
mounting
casualties and streams of refugees. Contrary to ominous
predictions in the world media, this was not full-scale civil
war, at least not yet. If anything, the fighting in Tetovo
was intended as a
warning, a foretaste of what was to come if the Macedonian
government were to continue refusing the so-called "peace"
proposal brokered by EU/NATO/U.S.

Macedonians fled Tetovo in droves, joining their compatriots
expelled
at gunpoint from villages above the city, now under UCK
control. A large group of them rioted
in Skopje Tuesday night, attacking the US Embassy, British
Airways office, OSCE offices and a McDonalds.

UCK bandits
had almost reached
the town center of Tetovo before a new cease-fire was
called Tuesday. Additionally, member of the bandit "General
Staff" Nazmi Beqiri told Reuters the UCK had two brigades
operating around the town of Gostivar in the southwest.

The fighting
came in the wake of collapsing "peace talks"  sessions in
which Imperial legates James Pardew and Francois Leotard attempted
to impose the ready-made "agreement" on local participants.
Macedonian representatives refused to sign them last weekend,
supposedly over the issues of Albanian
language and local policing.

DESPERATE FUMBLE

That is
not what the Macedonian representatives said, denouncing
the plan as "serious interference in internal Macedonian affairs."

Said Prime
Minister Georgievski, "Now the masks are off and it is clear
that the terrorist organisations in Macedonia enjoy serious
backing and logistical support from Western democracies."
(AFP)

His government,
however, has no clue what to do next. It is far easier to
oppose the West verbally than in practice, especially since
the horrid lesson of Serbia drove home the possible consequences
of such an act. Furthermore, Macedonia's leaders see their
future in becoming
part of the EU, perhaps hoping that this would guarantee
their country's sovereignty and security. This is a false
hope at best, a dangerous delusion
at worst.

A chorus
of voices from the West is denouncing
the Macedonians for refusing to cave in, and at the same time
denying
doing so. Pardew and Leotard also reject accusations that
they blamed Macedonians for the recent fighting. But a Reuters
report clearly mentions a Western diplomat saying
that "the fighting played into the hands of hard-liners on
the Macedonian side who want to scupper talks on a
peace deal.... Blame today's events on those factions on one
side who don't want peace." [Emphasis added.]

Not surprisingly,
pro-establishment media in the West are leading the way, with
all news agencies repeating phrases such as "hard-line elite"
among the "Macedonian Slavs" that "stokes nationalist fervor"
through the Prime Minister's "tirades."

Having
agreed to open the supposedly inviolate constitutional principles
to discussion with his Albanian "partners" in government,
Georgievski severed the branch he was sitting on and tumbled
down the slope of negotiating away his country's sovereignty.
His latest moves are less a renunciation of this immoral policy,
however welcome that would have been, than an attempt to get
a better deal by playing the pouting child. He obviously did
not read the script very well; only the protégés of the Empire
can play that role and get away with it, from Alija Izetbegovic
in Dayton to Hashim Thaci in Rambouillet.

Furthermore, Empire Casting C.S.A. has already given
the role to Arben Xhaferi and Imer Imeri. Their parties, DPA
and PDP, are in effect a political wing of the UCK  perhaps
even officially, since they never renounced the infamous Prizren
protocol, signed with the KLA and UCK leaders with American
mediation. Thus positioned, they can easily advance the Albanian
cause either through negotiations, or war. Indeed, PDP leader
Imer Imeri told Reuters Tuesday, having "made a compromise
by giving up 70 percent" of their demands, the Albanians were
now "waiting for something to be decided on the military side."

THE ALBANIAN
CAUSE (A REFRESHER)

The issue
here is not one of language or civil rights. It never has
been. The issue is one ethnic minority claiming nationhood
status, and using terrorism and propaganda about "human rights"
to achieve its goal. First of all, no one fights for civil
rights by taking up arms. The act in itself creates too much
bad blood for coexistence to be possible. Secondly, language
in the Balkans has always been a banner of not just nationality,
but nationhood. That is why only Serbs will still sometimes
say they speak Serbo-Croatian; others in the former Yugoslavia
insist on "Croatian," "Bosnian"
and even "Montenegrin." In other words: have language, need
nation-state.

In the
case of Macedonian Albanians, they insist not on freedom to
use their own language, but a government-enforced privilege
to not use another. Albanians need "their own social facilities"
to feel at home, since one cannot "create a new Macedonian
identity including Albanians," says professor Ismail
Mehmeti, of the illegal Albanian university in Tetovo.
It is a call for apartheid,
a society deliberately separated from the rest of the country
by language and ethnicity.

That separation
is then only a step away from becoming physical. Why else
would the UCK seize and hold territory, if its claim was not
territorial? This logic is so overwhelming, and its denials
by the UCK political wing (Xhaferi's DPA and Imeri's PDP)
and the Western powers so unfounded, there ought to be little
doubt about the Albanians' true purpose  and the support
it has within the Empire.

A BETTER ANALOGY

On second thought, the current situation in
Macedonia does not quite resemble the situation in Rambouillet.
Albright and her cohorts went to France fully intent of launching
a war against Milosevic and the Serbian people. Their ultimatum
was never meant to be accepted, only to serve as a whitewash
for aggression. It mimicked Austria-Hungary pathetic
excuse for a casus belli from 1914. Though the
method of imposition is the same as Dayton and Rambouillet,
Empire's current strategy in Macedonia far more closely matches
Munich
of 1938.

The focus
of US/NATO/EU "peace" efforts has been to achieve the Albanians'
military and political objectives peacefully, saving themselves
the trouble of an embarrassing war. Covering up or spinning
away all the crimes the UCK is likely to commit would represent
a tremendous challenge, one they would rather not face. They
have had plenty of trouble already with burying the story
of water shortages in Kumanovo and ignoring tens of thousands
of Macedonians ethnically cleansed from UCK-occupied territories.
Every so often, information
slips through.

So far,
the "mediators" have used up most of their Balkans playbook.
There were panicking Albanian refugees; "civilian" victims
of unidentified (but strongly alleged to be Macedonian) shells
inside Kosovo; a phony arms
embargo on the Kosovo-Macedonia border; reports of "human
rights abuses" by the appropriate Western organizations; and
now Rambouillet-like "peace talks," in fact an ultimatum demanding
one side's unconditional surrender.

Three things
have been conspicuously absent: a leader to be demonized,
atrocities to be presented as genocide and an actual intervention
against whichever side needs to be pulverized.

Of course,
with Skopje defending itself so ineptly and reluctantly, there
is little need for these extreme measures. Unless something
radically changes, sooner or later Georgievski and Trajkovski
will cave in, the UCK atrocities will be covered up, and the
intervention will take on the form of "peacekeeping" and collecting
a few token muskets from the
bandits-turned-policemen of the UCK. Albanians  if not
the Albanian state per se  will have gotten their
Sudetenland coup; within months, as soon as camera lights
go off, Bulgarians (another loyal US ally) will march into
what is left of the vivisected country.

Macedonia
will be no more. But there will be "stability"
and "compliance" with the Empire's power  which is all
its legates ever really wanted, the natives be damned. The
Balkans would thus have "peace in our time."

Nebojsa
Malic left his home in Bosnia after the Dayton Accords and
currently resides in the United States. During the Bosnian
War he had exposure to diplomatic and media affairs in Sarajevo,
and had contributed to the Independent. As a historian who
specialized in international relations and the Balkans, Malic
has written numerous essays on the Kosovo War, Bosnia and
Serbian politics, which were published by the Serbian
Unity Congress. His exclusive column for Antiwar.com appears
every Thursday.

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